Monday, June 4, 2012

De-Politicising Politics in California

Mark
Paul described last week how the
recently-created Citizens Compensation Commission has usurped still more
functions of the legislature in determining the rates of legislative pay in the
name of some kind of technocratic best-practise.It’s all fairly arbitrary, and represents a growing
tendency for Californians to seek the solutions to the state’s political
problems in turning powers over to boards and commissions.

This predilection for asking political
decisions to be made by boards of faceless bureaucrats stems from a mis-diagnosis
of the state’s problem.People are
forever trotting out the claim that our politics are too politicised, that
we’re hamstrung by partisanship, and that what we need is a politically-uniform
legislature comprised of “moderates”.

California’s ‘top-two’ primary is
another illustration of this brainless tendency.Primaries are designed to allow parties to
choose their candidates, but this ‘reform’ of primaries in California is having
the effect of further entrenching the already-undemocratic two-party system,
and denying voters of many political persuasions their rights during general
elections.For example, voters in
California will likely be faced with choosing between the neoconservative
Dianne Feinstein and some right-wing Republican in November.There is a fair chance than in one northern
Californian Congressional Districts, there will be two Republicans on the
ballot...and no-one else.Left-leaning
voters, of whom there are a few in the state, will have no candidate at all.In left-leaning Bay Area or Los Angeles
districts, right-leaning voters will find their rights similarly violated.

The ‘top two’ primary system, we are
told, is designed to elect ‘moderates’, whatever those are.But it is actually a form of election rigging
as pathetically dishonest as anything you can find in oligarchies around the
world.

It is at least partly this espousal of
anti-politics which looks to have driven the Record Searchlight’s endorsement of Michael Dacquisto for the first
Congressional District seat left vacant by Wally Herger.In endorsing Dacquisto, the Searchlight commended his approach to
the federal budget, which they characterised as “make across-the-board cuts,
and let the paid staff figure out how to implement them.If the legislative and executive branches
actually did this, it would be amazing the sorts of efficiencies that would
‘miraculously’ appear”.There are two
significant problems with this approach that stem directly from the attempt to
de-politicise the practise of politics.Firstly, across-the-board cuts just don’t make sense to me.This isn’t some game.People will suffer from cuts, and so if cuts
do indeed have to be made, you should pick and choose and think very hard where
they should fall rather than carelessly slicing across the entire budget.

Next is the question of putting off
responsibility to paid staff.We elect
our legislators according to the moral framework they espouse.We expect them to operate according to that
framework.So handing the baton to a
staffer or civil servant is a violation of the basic democratic compact between
voter and representative.There is no
a-political way to make cuts—even cutting evenly across the board is a
political decision, and one which sends the message that, for example, spending
on education or federal investment in job-creation programmes are no more
important than the Pentagon’s newest missile system.

Moreover, determining what qualifies as
‘waste’ is not a neutral, a-political act.Most Republican representatives, for example, ascribe to the
breathtaking belief that a classroom full of 45 students can be just as
effective as one of 20 students.If you
follow this line of logic, spending on more teachers qualifies as ‘waste’.Yesterday I was talking to a Department of
Agriculture employee here in Lusaka who described how Republicans in Congress
have been cutting back his agency’s ability to send its members to local conferences,
which are seen as ‘waste’—in spite of the directives the same Republicans gave to
federal agencies to engage in conferences and consultations with communities.The same people, depending on which side of
the bed they rolled out of, can’t even agree from day to day what is waste and
what is accountability!I’m horrified by
the global arms trade and the waging of war, and our government’s contribution
to it, and so from my perspective, most defence spending is ‘wasteful’.Needless to say, many people would
disagree.

For another example of the
wrong-headedness of efforts to depoliticse politics, take a look at the fate of
Americans Elect—the organisation which was supposed to transform the 2012
election cycle by putting a third candidate, basically one endorsed by
‘moderates’, into the race.This effort
imploded spectacularly, despite the lavish funding and wide publicity, and
there will be no Americans Elect candidate on the 2012 ballot.

No organisation that eschews viewpoints,
that is, ideology, is ever going to gain traction.Because the existence of partisanship in the
U.S. shows that people care about ideology.And that’s no bad thing.It is
difficult to even imagine what a political debate devoid of ideology would even
look like, or whether such a thing is in fact possible.The California Moderate Party, which recently
lost its head, is still another case in point.There was no philosophical basis for the party.Its members talked about Good Governance, but
‘good governance’ describes the ‘how’ and not the more important ‘what’.Besides, as any English teacher would tell
you, ‘good’ is a pretty weak word anyway, and doesn’t enlighten us in the
slightest about what such a party actually believes.

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My efforts to vote from central Africa
have been stymied by my failure to secure a permanent address a few months ago,
but I would certainly have voted for Jim Reed in the hopes that Doug LaMalfa
will have a progressive challenger in the general election.I would also have voted against Prop 28,
which in tinkering with term limits proposes the half-hearted kind of reforms
which yield unanticipated consequences down the road and encourage Californians
to think that piecemeal meddling in our constitution is the route to democratic
solvency.I’m sceptical of Prop 29, the
cigarette tax, for similar reasons: yes, in our current state, higher taxes on
tobacco and the revenue which would come with them would be a good thing, but locking
the resulting funding into a particular section of the budget doesn’t make much
sense.Nor is it a good idea to
encourage Californians in their delusion that this kind of small-fry tax on
‘someone else’ is the answer to our dilemma (I have to admit I’d be tempted to
vote ‘yes’ just to put a finger in the eye of the appalling tobacco
industry).

Our predilection for investing
un-elected boards and commissions with very political powers, our unwillingness
to look at the consequences of voter ballot-box budgeting, our willingness to
criticise legislators for failing to exercise powers that they don’t actually
have, and our general conviction that what we need is less politics—when actually what we need is simply to rationalise
the political structure—are all having serious consequences.We’re doing in our democracy, initiative by
initiative, and in mis-diagnosing the state’s ills, are passing up an
opportunity to pause and meaningfully reform the structure of our politics.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.